milyon88 We Were All Just Catching Up to Lorraine O’Grady

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Lorraine O’Gradymilyon88, the conceptual and performance artist who died on Dec. 13 at age 90, was an inveterate correspondent — you never got a short note from Lorraine, you got the full intensity of her warmth, intellect and inquisitiveness in long missives often sent in the middle of the night, her favored time to work.

But still I was surprised a few years ago, arms deep in her archives, to find that she had made carbon copies of what seemed like every letter she had ever sent from her early 20s until the advent of email — whether to professional contacts, recalcitrant vendors, potential collectors, her relatives, her friends. There were even carbon copies of her breakup notes to old lovers.

Though she didn’t become an artist until age 45, she was confident from a young age that she would one day be considered a genius, no matter what the field. And she knew, too, that her importance would likely be recognized only belatedly, given the way Black women’s contributions were so often overlooked. If she didn’t save all of this stuff, no one else was going to.

Image“Cutting Out CONYT 04,” 1977/2017, O’Grady’s attempt to find traces of Black female subjectivity in a world that seemed intent on ignoring or erasing it.Credit...Lorraine O’Grady; via Lorraine O’Grady Trust.

When fame finally came, it was for her wide-ranging practice over four decades, her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism; her critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, race and identity.

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Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

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